


rot.

by cyanica



Series: maybe i just took too much cough medicine [whumptober 2020] [5]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Angst, Blood, Body Horror, Broken Bones, Bucky Barnes Has Issues, Bucky Barnes Has Nightmares, Bucky Barnes Has PTSD, Bucky Barnes Needs a Hug, Captivity, Childbirth, Forced Pregnancy, Gore, Hurt Bucky Barnes, Implied/Referenced Torture, M/M, Mild Hurt/Comfort, Mpreg, Night Terrors, Nightmares, Pain, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Pregnancy, Pregnant Bucky Barnes, Protective Steve Rogers, Suicidal Thoughts, Vomiting, Whump, Whumptober 2020, graphic birth, graphic labor
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-10
Updated: 2020-10-10
Packaged: 2021-03-07 16:02:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,066
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26930329
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cyanica/pseuds/cyanica
Summary: His body wasn’t this own, it belonged to the thing destroying it from the inside, it belonged to the handlers that broke and devoured and mutilated it as if it were clay for them to build up into something momentous, only to smash it into smithereens.Or Bucky dreams of his own corpse, a cell that smelled of infectious poison, and a pool of red that lay between his bloodied thighs.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers
Series: maybe i just took too much cough medicine [whumptober 2020] [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1947775
Comments: 2
Kudos: 55
Collections: Whumptober 2020





	rot.

**Author's Note:**

> or weird, fucked-up body horror coz why the fuck not? warning coz this is graphic, if you didn’t read the tags and are like o.O why am i here. sorry lmao.
> 
> whumptober prompt day 6: please…, “get it out”, no more.

“No,” he murmured, leaning his aching flesh against the frozen cement wall, and trying to hold his fraying, fragmented body together as everything came undone and the inhuman flesh of his corpse unmade his being like unravelling cotton seams that he sometimes dreamt about within the hazy isolation of his cell.

He didn’t stand up, instead falling like insignificant lost pieces onto the icy ground, wrapping an arm around his convulsing abdomen as excruciation bled through his abused stomach as if the bones were imploding, colliding against each other, shattering into smithereens and morphing his flesh into something unrecognisable. The movement of collapsing into a low squat didn’t agree with the amazing combination of stemming contractions, sleep deprivation and the very constant sickly nausea burning through his throat, and he thinks that _maybe_ , he should call for the handlers – 

_– although_ , they’d been watching him for days as he writhed on the mattress now covered in mould, blood and vomit; watched as he had clamped his legs so tightly together that bones in his pelvis had broken from the force; watched as their inhuman tool of a weapon screamed out for a name that was long dead and ancient –

But no one had ever come. He wasn’t sure why he thought they would.

The wave of the contraction coursed through his body like water against paper, ripping the muscles of his stomach and legs like they were being crushed into bloodied ribbons of abused fresh, only to expand out again to stretch his flesh taut and raw.

The agonizing, hazy pressure that pushed from low within his swollen abdomen ground against the wall of his spine, spending rivets of pain against his body with each collide against the fragmented bone. 

The pain only built as he lay squatting against the cold, jagged wall, holding his taut, bloated stomach as it contorted underwater his fingertips, tightening, tearing, aching in a momentous effort to expel the _thing_ from his body.

The peak of the contraction had him shaking, pressed up against the stone, legs melting like ice in the feverish sun despite his body being drenched in a cold, trembling sweat within this nothing abyss where only the windowless cement walls, the disgusting concrete flooring and his moulded mattress existed. The scream that dragged itself from his bloodless, fraying lips was that of pyretic agony, low and guttural from the depths of the gut, as the contraction pulsed from within his abdomen, the solid mass inside nothing but pure, unrelenting pressure against his aching hips and spine.

His bones felt as if they’d collapse into fragmented smithereens of glass shards, tear into the skin from the inside of his stomach and cut the organs and flesh and lifeforce he held within him until nothing but bloodied, crimson-soaked seams of frayed undead inhuman remains remained.

He collapsed onto his hands and knees as the convulsing of his muscles simmered off into an almost-bearable ache that would have had him writhing hours ago, and let his swollen, throbbing stomach constrictions die off as he gulped in starving breaths. 

The pressure against his hips and spine was a constant, infinitely plunging into the bones, threatening to shatter them apart like insignificant glass. His futile effort from hours ago born from distress and panic to stop whatever was happening to his body by squeezing his legs shut hard as he could without his femurs breaking apart, had now ceased entirely, and now the only thing his body demanded was the thing _out_.

He thinks he may be crying. It wasn’t something he was allowed to do, or ever even did after everything else in the word hurt to the point it was familiar, customary – but this was something else, something evil. The hurt wasn’t the familiar pain lulling him to sleep as he lay in his cell with torn flesh, molten bruises devouring his vermilion-tainted flesh where fragmented bone pieces hung beneath his skin, rotting inside his body until they ripped apart the tissue until it festered a putrid, septic black. 

No –

_This_ was excruciation, it was _dying_. He was no longer a living weapon, one made from titanium and oxymoronic human bone – he was a corpse, lying in the gallows of hell’s dynasty where the faceless monsters fed off his decaying decomposition until the thing inside of him devoured him too as the monsters had him before it.

He inhaled sharply, the warm thickness of undead blood and fluid ran down the insides of his legs. He felt thrown into a lifeless world where everything was rotten and infected and smelled of the putrid inhuman stretch that expelled from inside of him. The darkened, almost obsidian hydrous liquid shone a sickening luminescence in the pale, dim light reflecting off his metallic arm. It coated the stony, concrete floor until it had tainted his knees in the feverish vileness, enough to have him gagging up nothing but air as the undead, rotting aroma of his own corpse bleeding out of his skeleton consumed him.

He knelt on the cement, naked and trembling, forehead pressed against the seeping frost of the cell floor, letting the iciness of the ground consume his fraying, unmade brain like the frostbite that had devoured away the flesh and bone of his rotting human arm.

“Please,” he gasped from pale, split lips that oozed with blood from the many indications of his teeth. He had torn the bottom one into shreds, an array of jagged lacerations that littered the expanse of his mouth as if had been cut by glass, all in an insignificant effort to keep still, silence, unbroken the way a weapon should behave if faced with malfunction, instability, deformity. 

Now, he ground his teeth together instead, clenching so tightly around the insides of his mouth that the taste of pungent iron exploded onto his tongue, and though more blood he’d ever thought contained in his inhuman body was erupting from inside him in seeping rivers, he couldn’t feel anything else other than the agonizing excursion existing within his stomach. 

He stifled a sobbing groan as the convulsing pain rose up from deep within his abdomen, making the skin of his swollen stomach become taut with contracting muscles and sweat from the undeniable pressure the _thing_ inside radiated against his bones. The stretching and pulling of his thin skin was visible upon his stomach as it swelled in redness, contorting underneath the touch of his hands. This wave was longer, more agonizingly intense than the other contractions had been, and the newfound cramp against his skin erupted a muffled sob against the stone from where he pressed his face to it.

The pressure in his stomach reached a tolerance that was beyond bearable – even for his undead, inhuman corpse where he lied praying for the relieving release of eternal, permanent death. Inaudible words erupted with an unholy scream, leaving his lips and bouncing off the walls of the unilluminated, dank cell. The amplification of the deranged, animalistic sound seared a pulsing headache imploding like fire behind his eyes, streaming tears burning from his eyes like a chorus of symphonic agony. The pure metallic taste hit his tongue and spewed onto the ground, onto his hands and chest like scarlet ruby paint that splattered against a pristine white canvas, and he choked on it until he could no longer breathe.

A crazed, erratic moan made its way up his raw throat, escaping the cascade of endless, undead blood, through his skinless lips as he fought with everything he had to rid the pain. He doubled over onto the grime-covered stone, collapsing into the heap of decomposing, rotting corpse that was his body on top of the vile mattress, and wrapped aching fingers, both feverish flesh and metallic titanium around the bulk of his engorged stomach. The desperate, unsteady hold he had on the thing writhing inside of him seemed to erupt with reborn agonizing compression underneath his clenched fingers leaving bloodied indentations on his skin; and yet he couldn’t move. His body wasn’t this own, it belonged to the thing destroying it from the inside, it belonged to the handlers that broke and devoured and mutilated it as if it were clay for them to build up into something usable, only to smash it into smithereens. 

The internal convulsion around his constriction arms reached to the pulsing behind his eyes, the searing flame burning through his spinal cord like wildfire, and cutting off the sensation to his legs as if they no longer belonged to his dying corpse, just as the flesh arm hadn’t when it had belonged to the snow instead. One by one, the pieces he’d once owned of himself were becoming lost to the monster inside, and he could feel each piece of it die and rot and burn in the wake of becoming something else – something inhuman, something dangerous, something evil.

The guttural, low screaming sounds coming from his mouth were louder as the sheer force of the internal mass collided against his bones until it had reached the marrow, igniting his spine and pelvis in gasoline-fueled embers until renewed, uncontrollable burning tears pushed themselves from his eyes, streaming down his damp cheeks until he was sobbing – hyperventilating – against the agony. 

The thing inside his festering, fevered corpse was tearing itself from his body in violent, bloody ways – and he came undone like paper and twine and strings from torn marionette dolls. 

So maybe he screamed within the small space between the mattress and the concrete, boundlessly dying as an infected, rotten corpse that would never succumb to the finality of liberating afterlife. No, the demons that plagued it deemed such mercy forbidden – therefore he was forever condemned to fester in undead, soulless purgatory until the end of infinity, or perhaps until the handlers were bored.

Because this wasn’t the end. He was trapped in sempiternity along with the stars, and would burn and burst and collapse as they had before him – an eternal cycle, a serpent eating its own tail, _when you cut off one head –_

“Please...” he whispered into the abyss that never answered. The words sounded like a prayer, a mantra on his lips that faded into the ephemerality of rapture like the snowflakes that had melted on his warm, feverish blood against the ice after he fell from the sky.

The agony rose like the undead as each contraction built upon the next in sickening ways that were sadistic in their nature, overlapping until he could barely breathe in between them. He didn’t even feel grounded to his body anymore, as some instinctive, uncontrollably instinct had taken full ownership of his being and forced the muscles of his broken body to expel whatever was writhing inside him, just as the blood and marrow and bone had erupted from his organs, his orifices, his sanity. 

The pressure flourished throughout his veins, dragging whatever had imbedded itself inside him against the walls of his stomach that ripped and shredded and tore from each agonizing cramp. Completely consumed by the eternal pressure against his bursting flesh, the deranged mass inside his swollen stomach moved and jolted as he lay on the ground, screaming until his vocal cords were that of smothering ash and dust within his throat. 

The unbearable force came away with a release of blood and fluid that painted the mouldy flooring in decomposing human remains as the mass was exiled from within him, rotten and black and charred to the bone where its marrow leaked septic yellow pus, dripping with acidic infection.

It was the shape of an infant.

The undead child made of rot and decay lay between his legs, unmoving as the blood from his own corpse pulsed all around it. The site of the thing freed from his abused, contracting stomach in all its glorious, undead corrosion was enough to make him vomit. Despite not having eaten in days, sickly bile erupted from his gut and spilled all over the ice, concocting a kaleidoscope of necrosed imagery of all things undead and dying, and suddenly he was either floating or drowning within the end of all things like descending into damnation.

The intoxicating haze of the post-exorcism impermanency had fog dowsing through his brain like fleeting stars behind his eyes, and suddenly the intangibility of his flesh, his limbs, his bones smothered his corpses like drowned water and cotton. There was a transcendental touch of a human, a cosmic, otherworldly caress of an undeserving hand that melted through the length of his trembling back, running down the ridges of his spine like cooling water saturating down his fevered skin. 

It wasn’t real. It couldn’t be. The touch was serene, inescapably familiar and too undeniably human against the septic remains of devoured bodily tissue. The world was too abstract, too unreal and impossibly grounding when the phantom hand drew lines upon his skin like building the mosaic of whoever he was back together from the thousands of glass shards and fragmented bones he was made of, drawing him into something better, as if he were that of art. 

_Art_.

“You’re okay, you’re okay, it’s okay.” The ghost said like a ritual or an incantation or the gospel. Against his undead, rotting skin, the specter continued to trace his back, draw little lines as if he were constellated stardust in the unearthly skies, and suddenly he became aware that the icy stone ground had melted away like the snowflakes after the fall, and the winter in his deadened cell had only been an ephemeral night – or perhaps a few decades.

His trembling body lay within the warmth of the phantom’s tangibility, skin against skin, flesh connected to another’s flesh like seams of cotton neither frayed nor unraveled.

He hung within the perfect haze of bittersweet oblivia, pain ebbing away with each beat of his pulsing heart like his corpse was neither the _thing’s_ , his handlers', or anyone else. It simply existed as he caught his breath with renewed oxygen that breathed lucidity into his lungs and clarity inside his mind, allowing for the fog to dissipate at the seams.

“Hey, I’m right here, you’re okay. You’re safe, you’re with me.” The words solidified inside his head, enough for the racing of his pounding heart to calm once the screams had died from his throat and evaporated into the nothingness of the night, held together by the art.

The art.

The art held his lively, breathing, tangible body in its lap, drawing its steady hands like paint strokes against his back. The ground was soft and floaty beneath the warmth of their bodies, upon a mattress that was feathery and light rather than rotting at the seams. 

He placed a solidifying, corporeal hand to the flat of his stomach, as if to convince himself of what was real and what wasn’t, what was dream and what was reality, and then left it there for _the art_ to lace its fingers within his own. Together, they were warm and real against the trembling flesh of his abdomen, while the distant, abstract ache was fading into smithereens as had the unreal memories of his own corpse, the cell that smelled of infectious poison, and a necroding infant that lay between his bloodied thighs.

“It’s okay, you’re here with me. I’ve got you, Buck.” The art said. Steve said.

“Sorry.” Bucky breathed, keeping Steve’s hand to his stomach, as if it were a form of protection in its unique, very human way. His presence was gravitating, enough for Bucky to feel so undeniably alive within its embrace. “I just had a really weird dream.”

“You were screaming,” Steve murmured softly, lightly pressing his pinkish lips to the salty skin of his lover’s shoulder, taking away the pain with intimate familiarity. 

“I scream a lot of nights,” Bucky huffed, as if that were any type of constellation. Unsteady air pushed out from his lungs as Bucky's throbbing heart settled to feel as if it were no longer exploding.

“What was it about?” Steve whispered, his hand continuing to press into Bucky’s where their fingers stayed laced upon his abdomen – maybe a little uncomfortably, digging into his flat stomach enough for Bucky to feel his heartbeat against it. 

“Nothing,” Bucky said instead, and though the touch to his still-sensitive abdomen was fading with the pain it had radiated within the dream, their hands on that part of his flesh felt claustrophobic, _wrong_. 

“I don’t remember.” The lie pressed itself from his teeth with a sudden flicker of panic contorting in his gut, and for a few terrifyingly long seconds, Bucky thinks he felt bile rising from his throat as nausea swelled from the place where his and Steve’s fingers were laced together against his body.

“You alright?” Steve sat up from behind Bucky, pushing himself up to see the contorted face of his lover scrunching his eyes shut, and clamping his other hand against his mouth.

He thinks he felt it, the rising bile deep within his gut and throat, staring to devour his body whole – contaminating it in the way the rot and infection and necrosis had until it _became_ him; until his own body decayed like a corpse, drowned in parasites, vomit and rotten, mutilated monsters that masqueraded as human infants.

But it wasn’t nausea. It was panic. Unnerved, raw terror floated from his being as if it were the intangible, undead agony of his breaking bones, twisting muscles and convulsing, _pushing_ stomach.

"Uh huh. Go back to sleep.”

It didn't fade away like the dreams he dreamt normally did. 

For days beyond the nightmare had occurred, Bucky couldn’t rid himself of the consuming, undeniable terror that had slithered into the base of his stomach like a constricting, writhing serpent underneath his skin. The panic pulsing like blood throughout his veins had Bucky trembling, shaking almost all of the time, enough that glassware and china shattered to the floor, and most often than not, he collapsed with it.

_He just had to be sure –_

It was a Thursday, a month after the dream had played like an old VHS in his mind, and the panic had condemned him to a hyperventilating, broken piece of corpse on the bathroom tiles, festering with the rot and grime and mould that infected the flooring and walls, because –

Because the little white plastic test was positive.

_Pregnant_.

**Author's Note:**

> did i have you in the first half? sike it's all a dream, but SIKE ITS NOT.


End file.
